Bernard Stiegler works systematically through the current crisis in education and family relations resulting from the mesmerizing power of marketing technologies. He contends that the greatest threat to social and cultural development is the destruction of young people's ability to pay critical attention to the world around them. This phenomenon, prevalent throughout the first world, is the calculated result of technical industries and their need to capture the attention of the young, making them into a target audience and reversing (...) the relationship between adults and children. _Taking Care_ exposes the carelessness of these industries and urges the reader to re-enter the "battle for intelligence" against the drive-oriented culture of short-term attention characteristic of the negative aspects of the new technologies. Long-term attention, Stiegler shows, produces retentions of cultural memory mandatory for social development—and for the counteracting of ADD and ADHD. Examining the history of education from Plato to the current quagmires in France and the United States, he tracks the notion of critical thinking from its Enlightenment apotheosis to its current eradication. Stiegler is unique in combining the most radical of theoretical constructs—such as "grammatization"—with quite traditional values, values he proposes we re-address in our not-so-brave new world. (shrink)

_Paradoxes of the Infinite_ presents one of the most insightful, yet strangely unacknowledged, mathematical treatises of the 19 th century: Dr Bernard Bolzano’s _Paradoxien_. This volume contains an adept translation of the work itself by Donald A. Steele S.J., and in addition an historical introduction to the masterpiece, which includes a brief biography as well as an evaluation of Bolzano the mathematician, logician and physicist.

Current thinking and research on consciousness and the brain.

This book presents the thought of the Kyoto School in comparison with continental philosophers better known in the West and addresses the affiliation of some of its members with the militarism of the 1930s and 1940s.

After more than a decade teaching ancient Greek history and philosophy at University College, Oxford, British philosopher and political theorist Bernard Bosanquet resigned from his post to spend more time writing. He was particularly interested in contemporary social theory, and was involved with the Charity Organisation Society and the London Ethical Society. He saw himself as a radical in the Liberal Party, and at a theoretical level he was a 'collectivist', considering the individual to be a part of a (...) larger social organism. He thought the state should be in harmony with the general will, and that going beyond it would lead to repression. Bosanquet's political ideas are explained in this influential work, which was published in 1899 and ran to four editions by 1923. Bosanquet begins with the theory of state, and then addresses sociological and philosophical ideas about politics before examining the idea of 'will'. (shrink)

The world of our experience consists at all times of two parts, an objective and a subjective part . . . The objective part is the sum total of whatsoever at any given time we may be thinking of, the subjective part is the inner 'state' in which the thinking comes to pass.

Thirty-five years ago the editor of a collection entitled Philosophy of Mind could plausibly claim that his selection of a dozen articles was representative of the wide range and vitality of contemporary inquiries. There was no need to categorize; he had chosen articles on the basis of merit, whether or not, in the aggregate, they encompassed the major problems or topics that are the special province of the philosophical study of mind. A 1991 text, on the other hand, offers five (...) major categories, some requiring as many as four subdivisions—obviously in the interest of careful analysis. Yet it is not clear why, for example, “Consciousness, Self and Personhood” should constitute a subset of “The Nature of Mind,” when “Self and Other” occurs as a major category two hundred pages earlier. I am only pointing out the vicissitudes of classification, too little in one case, in the other seemingly too much of a good thing. With these and other collections in mind, one might well conclude that the subject matter of philosophy of mind is too diffuse to allow precise organization and definition. (shrink)

The technology of undersea communications, from stranded-wire telegraph cables in the 1850s to fiber-optic cables at the end of the twentieth century, and its social, political, and economic impact. By the end of the twentieth century, fiber-optic technology had made possible a worldwide communications system of breathtaking speed and capacity. This amazing network is the latest evolution of communications technologies that began with undersea telegraph cables in the 1850s and continued with coaxial telephone cables a hundred years later. Communications under (...) the Seas traces the development of these technologies and assesses their social, economic, and political effects. If we cannot predict the ultimate consequences of today's wired world--its impact on economic markets, free expression, and war and peace--or the outcome of the conflict between wired and wireless technology, we can examine how similar issues have been dealt with in the past. The expert contributors to this volume do just that, discussing technical developments in undersea cables, management of the cables by private and public interests, and the impact on military and political activities. Chapters cover such topics as the daring group of nineteenth-century entrepreneurs who wove a network of copper wires around the world ; the opening of the telegraphic network to general public use; the government- and industry-forced merger of wireless and cable companies in Britain; and the impact of the cable network on diplomacy during the two world wars. (shrink)

tome I. IVe s.-XIe s. -- tome II. XIIe-XVe s. -- tome III. XVIe s.-XVIIIe s.

This work is the first book-length study devoted exclusively to a scholarly and systematic analysis of how soldiers returning from battle have been, or should be, treated morally. Long-scattered historical material is pulled together from a variety of sources to show why and how the early medieval custom of imposing penances on returning warriors first originated, and then, by the end of the Middle Ages, had lapsed into disuse.

"The need to speak, even if one has nothing to say, becomes more pressing when one has nothing to say, just as the will to live becomes more urgent when life has lost its meaning."--from _The Ecstasy of Communication _First published in France in 1987, _ The Ecstasy of Communication_ was Baudrillard's summarization of his work for a postdoctoral degree at the Sorbonne: a dense, poetically crystalline essay that boiled down two decades of radical, provocative theory into an aphoristically eloquent (...) swan song to twentieth-century alienation. Baudrillard's quixotic effort to be recognized by the French intellectual establishment may have been doomed to failure, but this text immediately became a pinnacle to his work, a mid-career assessment that looked both forward and back. By carefully distilling the most radical elements of his previous books, Baudrillard constructed the skeleton key to all of the work that was to come in the second half of his career, and set the scene for what he termed the "obscene": a world in which alienation has been succeeded by ceaseless communication and information. _The Ecstasy of Communication_ is a decisive, compact description of what it means to be "wired" in our braver-than-brave new world, where sexuality has been superseded by pornography, knowledge by information, hysteria by schizophrenia, subject by object, and violence by terror. The Ecstasy of Communication is an anti-manifesto that confronted and dispensed with such influences as Marshall McLuhan, Guy Debord, and Georges Bataille. It is an essential crib-book, lexicon, and companion piece to any and all of Baudrillard's books. Twenty-five years after its original publication, it remains not only a prescient portrait of our contemporary condition, but also a dark mirror into which we have not yet dared to look. (shrink)

After more than a decade teaching ancient Greek history and philosophy at University College, Oxford, British philosopher and political theorist Bernard Bosanquet resigned from his post to spend more time writing. He was particularly interested in contemporary social theory, and was involved with the Charity Organisation Society and the London Ethical Society. Much of his work focused on the place of logic in philosophy, especially its role in metaphysical thought - the area where he is considered to have made (...) his most important intellectual contributions. In 1888 he published this two-volume study of logic, addressing a variety of questions relating to logic, and drawing from the work of Hegel in his examination. In Volume 2, Bosanquet focuses on inference, arguing that it has a similar essence to judgment but is fundamentally different in that it is used to 'mediate' reality. (shrink)

Maine de Biran a toujours été considéré comme un représentant exemplaire de l'anti-matérialisme dans la philosophie française du début du XIXe siècle. N'a-t-il pas tenté, sur la base de l'expérience du fait primitif, de fonder une doctrine dualiste? Certes, mais des textes récemment publiés montrent que cela n'a pas toujours été le cas: vers 1800, sous l'influence des Idéologues, et particulièrement de Cabanis, il a, pour un temps, épousé les thèses du naturalisme matérialiste. Ce sont ces textes que nous examinons (...) ici, avant d'envisager certaines objections que l'on pourrait faire à notre interprétation. In the french philosophy of the XIXth century's beginning, Maine de Biran has always been regarded as a supporter of anti-materialism. Has he not tried to establish the foundations of a dualistic doctrine, on the basis of the « fait primitif »? Certainly, but some recently published texts show that it has not always been so: about 1800, under the influence of the Ideologists, Cabanis particularly, Biran has for a while endorsed materialistic-naturalistic theses. We examine here these texts and survey some objections against our interpretation. (shrink)

Ce livre interroge le sens donné par les jésuites à l'idée de Beau. Dans la quête d'un 'je ne sais quoi' mystérieux frappant l'âme humaine comme un 'feu céleste' pour l'élever au Beau absolu, les religieux veulent montrer l'alliance du Beau et du Vrai, point de rencontre avec la Vérité divine. Les 'extraits' critiques des Mémoires de Trévoux, dont ils assurent la rédaction entre 1701 et 1762, analysent les publications européennes en Sciences, Lettres, Arts et Mœurs. A cote de la (...) mise en valeur de l'harmonie de la nature par les physiciens et les naturalistes, les 'Trévousiens' soulignent la beauté des mathématiques, tout particulièrement la 'sublime et transcendante' géométrie. Parmi les productions artistiques et les 'ouvrages de l'esprit', la musique donne lieu a une intense querelle autour de la nature du son. Le potentiel didactique des vers latins est mis en avant, et l''expression mesurée de la nature' fait de la poésie une philosophique authentique. Quant a la peinture, elle doit prioriser 'la vérité'. Pour autant, le discours anthropologique trévousien ne se borne pas à un panorama 'raisonné' d'une culture moderne qui s'émancipe des pesanteurs traditionnelles. Il correspond aux exigences ignatiennes d'une spiritualité active et féconde. (shrink)